It’s common knowledge in the digital industry that success in business hinges upon a strong foundation of data. It’s what enables you to measure returns, benchmark success, identify trends, set budgets, and on. And most of us have invested time and money in implementing a robust data platform to serve our businesses.

If you’ve chosen Adobe Analytics, and either have Adobe Advertising Cloud or are considering it, there are significant benefits to using the two together, but you might not realise just how powerful these two solutions combined can be.

1. See the Full Conversion Funnel & Use It to Make Gains on Optimisation

Typically in tracking paid digital advertising, we see the click (alongside impression, cost, average position, and CPC). Then there’s a big black hole. Then there’s (hopefully) a conversion with all its aspects.

But what happened in between? And why have we as digital marketers accepted not knowing what’s going on between click and conversion for so long?

The impact of leveraging this data you already have in your PPC is multi-fold. It means you have a much more robust picture of every keyword’s performance, so both you and the bidding algorithm are more informed of the value of each keyword to your business. It means you have more data to work within the context of the proliferation of bid modifiers, which has created an issue of data scarcity – each keyword now requires more data behind it to be able to intelligently and accurately decision bids across dimensions like mobile, geo, and audience. And it means there’s also more information to go off of for long-tail and generic keywords that might not get clicks very often or that might be higher up the conversion funnel and have a bit of opacity around their contribution to the ultimate conversion down the line.

Adobe Advertising Cloud’s algorithm team did extensive analysis, and selected the five most significant on-site engagement metrics to bake into their master equation.

Once our customers leveraged the integration, they saw an average of 16% higher ROI and 15% more converting keywords.

Essentially, if you’ve got Adobe Analytics, you can get the data you already have driving more money for your business in paid advertising by leveraging the integration with Adobe Advertising Cloud.

2. Use Analytics Conversion Metrics to Define What You Optimise Towards

Users of Adobe Advertising Cloud already know they can create robust custom business objectives to attach to their Search, Social, and Display portfolios so they can define what is valuable for their paid digital advertising to chase.

Advertisers who also have Adobe Analytics can take that customisation to the next level, pulling in any other conversion metrics they deem relevant that can be linked back to a click. This means the bidding algorithm will understand exactly what results you’re interested in chasing, and not just a blanket ROI figure or a generic ‘maximise orders’ command.

It also means the metrics you’re chasing and the data you’re using is the same as the wider business. That puts your results in the context of the wider business, making it easier to demonstrate relevance and impact.

Speaking of context, those Adobe Analytics metrics you’re leveraging in Advertising Cloud are also viewable right next to the rest of your data – right down to the keyword level.

This means your teams managing your Search, Social, and Display activity can take advantage of richer data without having to learn the ins and outs of Adobe Analytics or ever dive into that part of the Digital Marketing Cloud. There is no extra effort on their part to have you get more out of your Analytics data. You just get more.

4. Deep-Dive Directly in Analytics

The integration between Analytics and Advertising Cloud is two-way. That means you can deep-dive through your SEM account hierarchy, for example, all the way down to the keyword level directly in Analytics.

In addition, with your paid digital advertising data in Analytics, you can slice, dice, and analyse it just like you would anything else you’re monitoring through the platform. This includes anomaly detection, contribution analysis, and the drag and drop analysis workspace that creates reports on the fly.

By having the data in both parts of the Cloud, you’re not only enriching your paid ad performance, but also getting more value out of Analytics, with even more data to work with for the wider business.

5. Integration is a Breeze

All the plumbing has been done on the backend to not only make this integration effective, but also incredibly easy to set up. All that’s required is the Analytics report suite name and the evars to be used. In the latest integrations, we’re even able to tap into evars specifically designated for use by Advertising Cloud, so your team doesn’t have to identify free ones. Then it’s just a matter of letting us know what metrics you want to pull in. We’ll tick those boxes for you, get the tracking parameters set to add onto the urls, and that’s it.

You’ll have the data flowing between the two platforms and will be able to get more out of your data on both sides.

So why not get the data you already have working harder by teaming Adobe Analytics up with Adobe Advertising Cloud? You’ll get incremental returns for no additional investment in your data platform.